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The issue of reunification with West Germany also seemed to be galloping forward faster than anyone had anticipated. Until now, the East German opposition has rejected calls for reunification. But in Leipzig, more and more posters reading GERMANY, ONE FATHERLAND are dotting the weekly demonstrations. And the round-table discussions last Thursday between party officials and opposition figures produced a call for a "new relationship" with West Germany based on "confederative structures." That echoed the language of a unification plan unveiled by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl two weeks ago, to the consternation of the British, the French and the Soviets, among others.
While East Germany faced a volatile situation -- the party dissolving but a government still more or less intact -- Czechoslovakia faced a situation that was equally volatile but opposite. The three-week-old party leadership of Karel Urbanek was holding firm despite the defection of thousands of members. Prague's government, however, was at a dangerous pass. After the Civic Forum, the country's leading opposition group, rejected a proposed new government that seated only five non-Communists among the 21 ministers, Prime Minister Ladislav Adamec warned, "I cannot act under pressure of one group of citizens." When the Civic Forum refused to withdraw its demand for half the seats in the Cabinet to be filled by non-Communists, Adamec resigned.
Within hours President Gustav Husak appointed Deputy Prime Minister Marian Calfa, 43, a lawyer and relatively obscure party member, as Prime Minister. The next day Calfa seemed to meet the Civic Forum's request by offering the group half the positions in a new Cabinet. Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who leads the Civic Forum, entered into negotiations with Calfa and seemed close to agreeing on the makeup of a government. The political atmosphere was further cleansed with the announcement Saturday night that the 76-year-old Husak would step down as soon as he swore in a new Cabinet. As a quisling installed by Moscow after the invasion of 1968, Husak has become increasingly reviled, and his departure has been a prime demand of the Civic Forum.
Havel also declared he would be willing to serve as President to help guide the country through its crisis. "If, God help us, the situation develops in such a way that the only service I could render my country would be to do this, then, of course, I would do it," he said. Havel's announcement was evidence of the opposition's new determination to insert itself into the power vacuum. Abandoning its earlier plan to remain nonpartisan, the Civic Forum proclaimed that along with its Slovak counterpart, Public Against Violence, it would endorse a slate of candidates in the parliamentary elections that it is demanding by next July.